How I used Reddit & Facebook to build a $25K/month business

Category: Entrepreneurship and Marketing

Tags: EntrepreneurshipOnline CommunitiesSocial Media MarketingStartup GrowthUser Acquisition

Entities: AnishFacebookIndie HackersInstagramMicrosoftProduct HuntRakutenRedditSave WiseStarter Story Build

Transcript

00:00

Started off really slow, but we're doing about $25,000 a month in revenue now. This is OV niche.

He's a solarreneur who built a $25,000 per month business in just 15 months with one strategy. This was the post that took me from single

00:15

thousands of users to tens of thousands of users. And what's even crazier is that he used this strategy to get thousands of users without spending a dime on marketing.

I brought niche onto the channel to break down his playbook that helped him grow to $25,000 a month. In this episode,

00:31

we'll dive into what everyone gets wrong about marketing and getting users, his five-step playbook to dominate Reddit and Facebook groups, and a deep dive into the exact posts that changed his business. And so, that's my five-step process for

00:46

figuring out how to get your early users from Facebook groups and Reddit. If you're stuck and trying to figure out exactly how to get users to your project, this one's for you.

All right, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story.

01:02

All right, Aish, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story.

My name is Anish. I'm the founder of a product called Save Wise, which is a platform that helps people earn credit card points and airline miles for things they're already buying online.

started

01:18

off really slow, but as I kind of found my footing with figuring out how to find my users, it's really taken off and we're doing about $25,000 a month in revenue now. Cool.

All right. Well, let's go back to the idea.

Tell me about what you were doing before. How did you come up with the idea for Save Wise?

How do we get

01:34

here? Yeah.

So, I've always worked in the tech industry. I've worked at companies like Microsoft and Instagram, Foursquare, and Dropbox.

But I eventually left because I always had this voice in the back of my head where I knew I wanted to build something from scratch that you know

01:49

nothing existed before I actually worked on it. And in these couple of months where I was brainstorming I kept coming back to the fact that I am really good at figuring out how to find deals and stack coupons and promo codes and earn credit card points online.

And at some

02:04

point it sort of hit me that this is such an incredibly manual process. There had to be a better way to do it.

And so I looked online to see if there was a product that fit what my process was and there really wasn't. And so I figured, you know what, if nothing else, this is a thing that I would want.

So let me

02:20

just try building it and see where it goes. It took a lot of hard work and eventually turned into what is now Save West today.

That's awesome. So you find this personal problem, you build the thing, but then you realize you have to get customers.

What happens next? Uh yeah, it was a a pretty tough realization that

02:35

I built a product that was kind of working for me, but then I had to go and find people to actually use it. I posted on Product Hunt.

Uh I posted on Hacker News. I posted on Indie Hackers and I actually got tons of traffic and then quickly realized that none of those

02:50

people stuck. I think the bounce rate was like 95 96%.

I got none of the feedback that I was actually looking for. Then I thought, I need to reach out to influencers and creators and people who have big audiences that can really push my product for me.

I probably sent 300, 400 different emails and messages.

03:08

I got a single email back out of all of those. Nobody who has an audience or influence cares about a product that is not ready is still looking for feedback.

So at that point, I knew I needed to take a very different approach, a very targeted approach, and to find the

03:25

people that this product was specifically designed for that I wasn't currently reaching through those tactics. Thanks for sharing that.

One of the big reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel is when we talked, you had told me about how you did find that strategy, how you did find those platforms. What

03:40

were those platforms? What actually worked?

So there were two main platforms that really worked for me. The first was Reddit and the other was Facebook groups specifically.

And so that was sort of the initial click in my head of focus on subreddits that were more related to

03:55

using products rather than building products unlike the indie hackers and the SAS subreddits and focus on the Facebook groups where people organized around travel and credit card points and things like that. Yeah, thanks for sharing that.

I think that's a huge realization that a lot of people who come on the channel talk

04:11

about. Can you break down how to get customers on Reddit and how to get customers on Facebook?

So, I managed to break down my process into basically a five-step playbook for finding your initial users online. The first step is to just brainstorm 5, 10,

04:28

15 different keywords, interests, demographics that are the kind of people who would actually use your product online. So, when you search Reddit, for example, for some of these interest wordss or communities, you're going to find a few communities that make a lot of sense for your product.

And one tool

04:44

that I found really, really valuable was something called the map of Reddit. And what this tool does is you basically enter a single subreddit, so credit cards, for example, and it will search all of Reddit and visually map out all of the different subreddit communities

05:01

that are vaguely or very directly related to that particular subreddit. And so it almost allowed me to traverse from one community to several different related communities where I could find more and more of these potential target users and customers of my eventual

05:17

product. The second perhaps most important step is when you join these Reddit and Facebook groups, do not initially post in those groups.

Some of the things that I would try to pay attention to were what were the kinds of things people were talking about? How

05:32

were they talking about them? That gave me a really good way to brainstorm what was the way to actually enter into the conversation rather than just heavily promoting and advertising my product because that was simply not going to work.

Step three is for each community,

05:48

you want to identify the goal for posting in that community. If you were to get the attention of these users, what is it that you actually want out of this group?

It could be that you're trying to understand what other products people use or what other problems people have. You could just be trying to

06:03

actually get people to try your product for the first time. But once you identify what your goal actually is, that will heavily influence how you post and what you post.

when you also factor in some of the mannerisms and etiquets of these different communities. And then

06:19

the other thing that I'd say is starting in the comments before you actually do a top level post. Starting in the comments is a very lowrisk way of figuring out is this type of stuff you're saying or asking actually resonating with the community.

And once you feel like you're

06:35

starting to gain traction in a Facebook group or a subreddit, then you can gradually work your way to a tople post, which obviously is going to have a lot more eyeballs to it. Step four is you want to set up keyword alerts on a product like F5bot for anytime people are talking about your product or topic

06:52

areas. And I entered a bunch of keywords very similar to the the interest groups and communities that I brainstormed early on and basically said, "Email me every time someone on Reddit mentions these few keywords." And I would get a real-time alert and I would go and read

07:07

that entire post on Reddit and Facebook and see is there an opportunity for me to get feedback about the product that I'm building or better understand the needs and wants of my target user base. And step five is to just be as helpful

07:23

as possible when you're posting online. There are so many people out there looking for advice, looking for opinions from people who are not necessarily experts, but just know a little bit more than them.

And so once I figured out a way to just organically and naturally be helpful by giving tips to people on how

07:39

to earn credit card points online or whatever, which is again very related to my product, that then earned me the right to also mention my product in some of these comments and posts. And so that's my five-step process for figuring out how to get your early users from Facebook groups and Reddit.

07:55

All right, Pat from the future here. We're putting the finishing touches on this video right now.

And I just wanted to mention how much I love the specific steps of niche shares to market his app. But if you don't have a project to actually talk about and market, then I have something that might be for you.

We

08:11

just launched Starter Story Build. It's a program where you will learn how to use AI to build and launch your product to the world.

The best part about Starter Story Build is that you don't need to have any coding experience. We'll give you the right prompts to use so that AI does all the work for you when it comes to building your product.

08:27

If you're actually ready to build and launch your product, just head to the link in the description to check out Starter Story Build. All right, let's get back to the story.

I think that's an amazing process for people to follow. But what I really want to understand from you, Ovnish, is how did you

08:43

actually do this? Would it be possible for you to actually pull up a Facebook group and show us what you did, what you posted, and how that led to you generating revenue?

So, when I was searching Facebook groups for interest keywords that were related to my product, one of the words that I

08:59

searched for was Rakitin. And I stumbled upon this group called Rakitin Stacks.

How to double dip with Rakitin. And what I realized was there were thousands of people in this group manually looking for these offers that my product could do with a single query.

And so I wrote a

09:16

SQL query that literally put together this list based on the data that my product had. I posted a link to this sheet in this post.

And when a member of the group opened this sheet, they would be met with this, which was the exact list that I posted, a list of stores,

09:33

the Rakutin offers, and the American Express offers. But then what they also saw was the link to my website, which is where all of the data was actually coming from.

I had over 1,500 people visit the website just from posting this

09:48

spreadsheet in this Facebook group. Well, thanks for sharing that post in the Facebook group.

I think that's super cool. Let's now move to Reddit.

Can you show me a specific example from Reddit that really drove customers for you? Yeah, absolutely.

So, what I did was instead of just posting immediately, I

10:05

joined the community, I monitored it for a few weeks and realized that I could post about it in their weekly Q&A threads in the comments. So, that's exactly what I did.

Every week or so, I would join that weekly comment thread,

10:20

post the website, and ask for feedback. And after about three and a half months, I had built out all of the core functionality that members of the community were just straight up telling me about.

And at that point, I messaged the moderator back and said, "Hey, are you still okay with me doing a tople

10:36

post?" They said yes. And I went ahead and posted, and this is the post that you see here.

And it blew up. And so this Reddit post alone sort of gives me the playbook that I would always use, which is find your target communities on

10:51

Reddit and Facebook. Engage in the comments after observing the behavior of other members of the group.

And then when you're ready to start posting in the comments, and at the top level post, work with the admins of the groups, the moderators of the group to figure out how to get a tople post when your

11:08

product is ready. All right.

Well, thank you for sharing. Now, I want to move to some of the numbers behind the business.

Once you find this growth strategy, it starts growing. How's this business doing now?

And what are the numbers behind Save Lives? We are now at a point where we're doing approximately $25,000 of revenue a month

11:23

and we're in the tens of thousands of users now. We have about 1,500 paying customers right now.

What's most fascinating is that I learned consumers hate subscriptions. I initially launched a subscription product and the day that I launched a subscription product, I had

11:38

several emails from members who wanted to buy the pro product asking for a lifetime membership where they were willing to pay for two plus years worth of the pro membership all upfront. That is now about 97% of the revenue people choosing the lifetime plan over a

11:54

monthly or yearly subscription plan. All right.

Well, let's switch topics a little bit. I know that you built a lot of this app and and built the early versions of it and still work on it.

What's the tech stack behind Safe Wise? Let's start with the front end.

So the front end is built in Nex.js. I host the web app on Verscell.

All of the data

12:12

processing, database architecture is all hosted on Azure. So there's a lot of data that my product hosts and I need a really easy way to interact with that data and so I use Retool for that.

I use Clerk which allows users to sign up for accounts with Google, Apple, etc. And I

12:28

use Vzero which was perhaps like the biggest unlock for me in the last 6 months. Before I was trying to design everything in Figma for tracking product analytics.

I use Post Hog. And a big part of my core workflow now is using AI products like ChatgBT and Copilot or

12:46

Cursor. And then the last tool that I use pretty regularly is Google Analytics just to see the real time traffic on the website.

All right. Well, last question that we have for everyone who comes on Starter Story, everyone who's built cool stuff like you, what advice would you have for young Ovnish before you started, before

13:03

you kind of made your first dollar and and found this idea? What advice would you have for him?

Something that I always thought was true was that understanding your target customer was really, really important for the specific features that you built. And that's still true.

But I think my realization through this whole

13:20

process is that understanding your target customer and everything about them is even more useful for the marketing part of it and going to market figuring out where do my target customers hang out on the internet. It has been way more impactful for that.

And so never forget about your target

13:35

customer, who they are, because it'll guide you not just for what to build, but how to go and get that product into their hands. Well, that's great advice.

Thank you for coming on the channel. Thanks for sharing everything that you've learned and hope to see you soon.

Thanks for having me, Pat.

13:51

Again, I wanted to thank Omnesh for coming onto the channel. I personally love how he broke down the exact steps that he just used within the last year to get thousands of users to his app.

If you're watching, this is something that you can go do right now. But if you're still in the place where you're looking

14:07

for your next project, then I think you should check out Starter Story Build. It's our program where we help you find an idea, build it with AI, and ship it to the real world.

In just a few days, you can have a real project that you can talk about online, just like Ovniche. Just head to the link in the description

14:23

to learn more and join Starter Story Build. All right, that's it for this episode.

Thank you guys for watching. I'll see you in the next one.

Peace.